


Hope

by anstoirm



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Corruption, Gen, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 23:29:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18537664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstoirm/pseuds/anstoirm
Summary: After a nasty accident while studying SIVA, Sloane Bakshi is struggling to keep her sanity, facing voices and whispers and phantoms telling her to hurt herself and hurt others. She's spiraling and she knows it, but she doesn't know how to stop it.Luckily someone else knows exactly what she's dealing with, and he has some words of advice.





	Hope

When she comes to, the first thing Sloane notices is a steady beeping.

Her eyes blink open slowly, blurry vision settling on machinery that takes her several long seconds to identify as medical in nature—assumably, it’s what’s making the beeping.

She wants the beeping to stop.

A groan leaves her. Every bit of her body and mind feels sluggish, her senses dulled and delayed like a heavy static has settled over her and is determined to keep her from who she is where she is _why she’s here_.

Medical equipment. A flat and uncomfortable hospital bed. Sterile white surroundings. That Sky-damned _beeping_.

She’s in the med-wing of the Tower. Was the obfuscation of her senses a result of drugs? It’s the only conclusion she can come to.

Even through the haze of whatever drugs are pumping through her veins she feels exhausted, tired for a reason she can’t fathom or can’t remember. Had there been an accident out in the field? Why couldn’t she remember? Where had she been before?

No answers are forthcoming, and she decides it’s in her best interests to just _go with it_ and turns her head back onto the pillow. Her eyes slide shut.

For whatever reason, the idea of falling asleep again just scares her. _Why_?

Slowly, infuriatingly slowly, her brain supplies her images—all the nightmares of past days-weeks-months, the whispering hiding in the dark corners of her mind and thoughts, the fear the _panic_.

She see Shaxx and Vera’s worried faces.

She hears a gunshot.

Her eyes snap open, the exhaustion not so much vanishing as pushed away in favor of anxiety. Of _fear_. Why is she so afraid? Gunshots were an everyday occurence for guardians. Their entire existence _revolved_ around gunfire and fighting and danger.

 _Why am I so afraid_?

The gunshot echoes between her ears, and with the numbing haze of the drags washing away with sudden clarity Sloane can feel the soreness in her back, the ache in her neck. Something has happened, they weren’t just everyday aches and pains. Something _something_ …

What?

There’s no visual accompanying the sound in her head, nothing to tell her why it’s there or what it’s supposed to mean or why the hell it _scares her so much_.

Swallowing the stone that had settled in her throat Sloane presses her eyes shut and wills the anxiety wriggling in her stomach to vanish, to go away—begs the whispering in the back of her head to _leave_ because she doesn’t want it and she’s tired of dealing with it.

Something had happened. Did it have something to do with those whispers?

Her senses return to her agonizingly slow and when they do she realizes, with no small amount of bittersweet amusement, that a light-binding cuff is keeping her restrained to the rail on the side of the bed.

There was another clue that made the wriggling in her stomach intensify; something had happened, the whispers were back, and someone didn’t trust her to be moving freely. Whatever it was that had landed her here, it hadn’t been good.

Everything she’s been struggling with, of late, made the words ‘it hadn’t been good’ fall so woefully short.

Her thoughts drift into anxious emptiness, the static clearing for just long enough—

—someone is in the room with her.

Eyes snapping open she jolts upright on the cot and drags her eyes around, taking in everything she can and not seeing a damn thing that could be causing the hair-raising feeling of being watched.

What now? Hallucinations instead of just voices? Phantoms that accompany the whispers? Ones that plague her presence and tell her to attack the people she cares about? To bleed them of their light and leave them dark and empty?

Her body is wrought with an animal fear that has her tense to the point of painful.

No one is in the room. _Someone_ is, but _no one_ is.

Swallowing again, she looks around one more time with slower and more careful eyes—and then she catches sight of white hair at the foot of her bed. Her throat restricts in panic and horror.

A little girl. _Her_ little girl. The same white hair and the same light blue skin, coruscating with light and her eyes dark and curious. There’s nothing but pure innocence in her gaze, but even if Sloane didn’t know _acutely_ why her little girl shouldn’t be here she can feel the crawling over her skin intensify under Stella’s stare.

“Ignore it.” A man’s voice says out of thin air. Sloane nearly screams at it, her heart leaping into her throat and gaze once again whipping around the room; this time she catches sight of the slight shimmer in the air that’s settled in the darkest corner of the stark white room. “It’s what I do.”

Out of the shimmer materializes the form of a hunter that had been completely immobile and silent, hidden by one of the light-given abilities of his class.

He’s tall, athletically built, and wearing dark clothes underneath burnished armor that’s equally as dark. Greaves, gauntlets, a chest plate—light and functional and typical of hunters. The pieces of armor have accents of forest green and are covered in scorch marks and scratches, remnants of dents that couldn’t be completely hammered out. Even the cloak he wore, pitch black with a thin edge of venom-green along the edge of the hood, is ripped and tattered where it brushes booted ankles.

Visual tales of hard-fought battles and fights to survive, ones that he came out of alive but maybe not unscathed.

This was a hunter that’s been alive for a _very_ long time.

The helmet he wears is stark black and featureless. He doesn’t remove it.

Most guardians would remove their helmets to speak to one another while in secure zones, whether it be for polite courtesy or just a desire to be more emotive. At first Sloane thinks that he isn’t doing so because he doesn’t feel she’s safe to be around, but something in her gut tells her that it’s just the way this hunter _is_.

She stares at the impartial and empty visor, trying to get _some_ kind of read on the man from body language or _anything_ , but he’s offering nothing outwardly. Not so much as a twitch of a finger.

Something draws her eyes down, and when they light on the handgun strapped to his thigh she wonders how she missed it the first time. It’s ichor-black, the frame jagged like teeth or thorns, and all along the barrel it pulses with sickly green light.

She must be imagining the way it almost seems— _hungry_. It’s just a gun. Whatever issues she’s dealing with, it _has_ to be her imagination.

“You see her too?” She finally asks after a length, her tongue leaden within her mouth.

His head turns towards the foot of her bed and she follows his gaze.

Her little girl is gone.

Great, so she _is_ seeing phantoms on top of everything else. Weakly hysterical laughter bubbles in her throat but she swallows it down.

“It looked like a ‘her’ to you?” He asks, and she blinks back over at him, confused.

“I thought you implied you could see her, too?”

His arms fold over his chest at the question but his head doesn’t turn back towards her, almost like he’s waiting for her to show up again. He doesn’t seem to have any desire to step closer to her while they speak. “I saw a shadow. That ghost is yours, not mine. Suppose being able to see it despite that is a...gift.”

She shivers in response, only managing to push away the fear by latching onto a piece of his answer. “You see ghosts?”

“Have for hundreds of years.” He answers, finally returning his focus back to her. She’s not sure if it’s an improvement. “Little girl. Blonde hair, bright smile, frilly pink dress. Never talked until recently. Quiet whispers.”

He’s staring at her, and the completely empty aura he’s putting off is making her skin crawl just as much as her little girl’s presence had—no, wait. It’s not _empty_ , it’s just...cold. Carefully impassive.

Eager for something to keep her from the subject of _whispers_ and _ghosts_ , Sloane allows her curiosity to take over and she studies the hunter a bit more carefully.

He’s completely still where he stands, almost to the point where it’s difficult to discern if he’s even _breathing_. Every movement he’s made up to this point from the simple turns of his head to the slow but deliberate shift as he crossed his arms, it all spoke of _absolute control_ to her. Like he’s pouring every ounce of his focus into restraining his entire being from everything around him.

Like he’s trying to be a blank slate, an empty husk. Unapproachable. Unnerving.

She wonders why.

“She was yours?” Sloane asks finally, not sure if she should. Her eyes flick back over to the end of the bed with discomfort, knowing that she’s certainly not comfortable with her own painful reminder.

His response is delayed and heavy. “Long time ago. Does yours whisper to you?”

Her breathing catches at the question and her eyes widen slightly. It’s a bad time for the whispering that had been nothing but a quiet haze at the back of her mind to crescendo into a dull roar, but she can’t control when and where the voices decide to coerce her with dark urges.

It can’t be her little girl that had been tormenting her with all these black thoughts recently. Not only was she—gone, not only that, but it wasn’t _possible_.

She’s not fine, and she knows that the blackness that had been pooling between her ears ever since that accident with SIVA wasn’t normal. Was she going insane? Had she dug just the slightest bit too deep, just like Toland the Shattered had once?

Was she going to be kept from Shaxx and Vera, exiled from the City for being corrupted?

Terror grips at her heart and she opens her mouth to lie that she has no idea what he’s talking about.

“There’s a darkness clinging to you.” He says, cutting her off before the words can even leave her mouth. For the first time she can hear emotion in his voice; barely a ripple, almost imperceptible, but the concerned frustration is enough to break through his impassivity. “I can feel it.”

Her vision blurs with panic that threatens to choke and overwhelm her and she drops her gaze to the sheets her hands are fisted in. She’s known it since they brought her out of the Plaguelands. SIVA had marked her to the point that not even Buddy could completely repair her.

The nightmares were evidence enough, but the fact that she’s stabbed herself and keeps having to resist her own impulses to harm the people she cares for—

“You nearly shot Ikora Rey.”

Shock jolts her out of the panic and her eyes snap back up to him. “ _What_?”

“I heard Shaxx... _talking_ about it.”

The way he hesitates before saying ‘talking’ has a trace of amusement to it; based on her own knowledge of the titan she knows that what he _actually_ means is he had probably been arguing with someone about the event. Loudly.

The event which she...can’t…

The _gunshot_.

Oh, Sky help her.

Inhaling sharply Sloane lifts her hands and presses them into the sides of her skull, tries once again to will the cacophony of voices that aren’t hers to subside, to be _quiet_ , to leave her _alone_. “I didn’t mean...I don’t—is she?”

“She’s fine.” His answer is quick and, she thinks, just the slightest bit gentle. For someone so consciously, tightly contained and controlled, it says a lot. “You lost control. People were there to intervene.”

The statement gives her no comfort. She had nearly _shot a Vanguard member_. She had _attacked_ someone. A whimper of fear bubbles in her throat.

“For what it’s worth, you aren’t the first to lose control in the Vanguard’s presence. Eris Morn spoke on behalf of one other beside you. They know that wasn’t _you_.” His voice is even quieter and much more obviously warm.

But she catches the second meaning in his words, and when she opens her eyes she levels them on the hand cannon at his side, staring and _wondering_.

She looks him in what she hopes is the eye again, her hands shaking as she lowers them back to her lap. She knows this hunter, now that she thinks about it—doesn’t she? He was clearly a veteran, knows Shaxx well enough to find amusement in his typically toothless temper.

He couldn’t mean _he_ was the other one, could he?

His head tilts to the side ever so slightly. Could he tell where her thoughts had gone? “You’ll regain their trust. You just have to learn to control it.”

“Control _what_?” She asks, her voice hoarse and strained; the throbbing in her skull makes it hard to think. “What is _happening_ to me?”

The whispers are wild and overwhelming, greedy and grasping and leaving flashes of red and black sinew in the corners of her vision; they want her to find the nearest weapon and rend this hunter to _shreds_.

“The darkness you faced is digging its fingers into you, and it’s going to keep digging until it wins and you dance like a puppet on its strings. You need to find the strength to push back. To fight it.” He must have known that her question was more rhetorical than anything else, but the fact he has an answer for her all but confirms her earlier question.

He knows exactly what she’s going through. He understands it intimately, regardless of how it took shape for him. Whether it was the little girl he mentioned or some other outside force, perhaps a kind of madness he’d been reborn with.

She doesn’t know what this is and doesn’t know how to get rid of it, but she wants it _gone_. The phantoms, the whispers, the stifling haze of losing control, all of it. It has her backed into a corner without a way to fight back and without a way to escape.

However he had fought it back, she didn’t have it. How do you fight against something intangible, something within your own _mind_?

“Look at me.” He says, and she blinks as it brings her out of the panic that had begun to build again, her eyes refocusing on him. His words are firm and unyielding, almost as though he’s trying to project his own strength and control into her. “The darkness will make you think your light is gone. Like you’re trapped in the black and there’s no way out. It’ll use that fear if you let it.”

“And what if the light _is_ gone?” She demands, her voice cracking and her eyes welling up.

The hunter takes a single step forward. “The light isn’t ever gone. It can be trapped, choked, diminished—but it’s always there. If you can’t find it in yourself, you let others lead you back to it.”

Her throat constricts with some unnameable emotion. She says nothing, the words not coming and all the questions she has jumbled and nonsensical.

“Hope is a hard thing to kill.” He says, voice quiet. “It can die, but only if you give up on it. Only if you let yourself believe it’s gone. And when you do, you’ll do things that’ll make you sick and ashamed. So you have to fight to keep hope from dying. You find it, you grab hold of it in whatever form it takes, and you don’t let go. _Ever_. Not even when it flickers.”

She swallows, wringing her hands together anxiously; he knows what this is. He knows, and he’s telling her how to fight it. _Hope is a hard thing to kill_. Even embers can start a roaring, sweeping fire.

Whatever black haze in her mind hisses at her or at him or at both of them, trying to grasp that knowledge and rip it away from her.

 _Find your hope. Grab it. Don’t let go_.

So she does. “Does it go away?”

He’s silent for a long, heavy pause. “No.”

Her lips tremble at the answer. _Find your hope. Find....find it. Don’t let go_.

“You can’t let yourself stop fighting it. You know what it is now. Recognize when it’s trying to take control. Fight it like you’ve got nothing to lose. Fight it harder if you _do_ have something to lose.”

With a shaky exhale Sloane lifts her hands and drags them down her face, and she _fights_. She reaches for every ounce of strength that tries to flee from her and she wills the angry hissing and whispers at the back of her mind away.

She thinks of Shaxx and Vera, of their smiles and laughter and her lips twitch into a smile at the memory of Shaxx once throwing her over his shoulder so he could run off while Vera chased.

The whispers are drowned out.

The hunter waits patiently, completely silent until she looks wearily over at him. No longer is his aura cold and dispassionate; he almost seems...satisfied. Proud. Is she imagining it?

He’s _incredibly_ difficult to read.

“What’s your name?” She asks him.

Whether he was going to answer or not, the door to the room slides open with a sudden hiss and both her and the hunter’s attention move to the doorway. Through it steps Vera, followed shortly by Shaxx’s imposing form—

The titan goes rigid upon catching sight of the hunter, his fists clenching tightly at his sides; Sloane doesn’t need to see his face behind the flat visor of his horned helmet to know some kind of fury has overtaken him.

Vera notices it as well and stops next to Sloane’s bed, blinking first at Shaxx and then following his gaze to the hunter—who’s gone back to standing as still and as silent as the grave, the aura of aloof coldness returning.

She doesn’t know the hunter well enough to tell, but she knows stillness with Shaxx usually spoke of impending violence.

“Shaxx, it’s okay. He’s—”

“You’re not going to convince him I’m a friend.” The hunter cuts her off, and both her and Vera look at him. He doesn’t look away from Shaxx. Probably wise considering at the moment Shaxx looks about five seconds from attempting to liberate the hunter’s limbs from his body. “I was, once.”

“And you never will be _again_ , Dredgen. You don’t belong here.” Shaxx says, electricity sparking around his arms. Sloane has never heard him _this angry_ before.

“No, I don’t.” The hunter agrees, completely unbothered by whatever damning accusation Shaxx was leveling onto him. No, not unbothered. Just...accepting of it.

Wait— _Dredgen_? Why does she know that word? That _name_?

Dredgen _Yor_. She can feel herself pale at the cold realization, her wide eyes going back to the hunter and flickering once again to the black hand cannon he carried. Was he—could he be? The legendary Dredgen Yor hadn’t been seen in hundreds upon hundreds of years, and this hunter was _old_.

But if he _was_ , why would he _help her_? She’s heard the stories, the whispers, seen the infinitesimally small words written in the margins of texts. Wasn’t the darkness his _game_? Why would he give her to tools to fight it, if he were one and the same?

He couldn’t be.

“You still hold that _vile_ weapon, and you have the gall to step foot in the City?” Shaxx’s voice rises in volume.

Now the hunter just seems amused. “Believe it or not, _old friend_ , I was invited.”

Shaxx advances on him with threat lining every tense muscle in his body. “Do you expect me to believe that one of our own would risk unleashing a guardian killer on the City? You are a _monster_ corrupted by the very things we fight.”

 _Guardian killer_. She sucks in a breath—hadn’t there been a true death, recently? One within a Crucible match, one that had left Shaxx furious for _weeks_? Is that what he was referring to?

“Do you call Eris a monster to her face?” The hunter asks pointedly, not so much as flinching at Shaxx’s attempt at intimidation. His arms drop to his sides and he nods over at Sloane, causing her to stiffen. “Are you going to call _her_ that to her face?”

Shaxx’s imposing fury is doused by the question, confusion replacing it like a bucket tossed over a campfire.

All three of them watch as the hunter—still unconcerned with Shaxx’s threat—in that carefully controlled way of his moves for the door. He sidesteps the titan and as he passes leaves a bitter statement with him. “Darkness leaves its marks. All we can do is own our failures and mistakes and move forward. Whatever you think of me now, Shaxx, that’s all I’m trying to do.”

Shaxx’s fists clench and unclench at his sides again as he deliberates stopping the hunter on his way out. He doesn’t, his stance just shy of relaxed.

The hunter starts to turn down the hall but pauses in the threshold, turning back and looking at Sloane once more. “Find your light. Don’t let anything take it from you.”

And then he’s gone.

No one in the room speaks for a heavy length, but then both Shaxx and Vera turn curious and concerned gazes onto her—she’s still looking at the place where the hunter had vanished with a stomach twisting in anxiety.

 _Hope is a hard thing to kill_.

 _Find your light_.

 _Don’t let go_.

Her light felt so far away. It felt nonexistent. She couldn’t see it anymore, and the black static in her mind is still there like a cancer, just waiting to infect her further.

Her eyes flicker between the two people that mean everything to her, and the ill feeling in her stomach eases.

Maybe it feels like it’s gone, but she holds onto his words. She had a reason to not give up hope, a reason to keep her light alive, a reason to _fight_.

And she was going to fight like hell.

**Author's Note:**

> sloane and vera are the OCs of two friends of mine, and i love them dearly.  
> they're both in a poly relationship with shaxx which is implied here, but i didn't feel it was enough to warrant a ship tag.


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